Dreaming of the Duke by Eva Devon

Author:Eva Devon [Devon, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Romance
Publisher: Bard Productions
Published: 2014-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

All this time, she had assumed her husband was the least reputable man in Christendom. She’d been mistaken. His brother certainly took the crack brained cake and given the circumstances, Jack was handling himself with remarkable aplomb.

Still, the very idea that she was imprisoned by not one but two Eversleigh brothers was more than there was to be born.

For perhaps the thousandth time, she lamented her unfortunate decision to leave behind her simple existence of categorizing mummies and scattered beads. England, so bucolic, and ruled by strictures as reliable as time itself, had appeared to have been an un-intimidating custard of a place compared with the wilds of Africa.

How mistaken she had been. And being mistaken was another state to which she was unaccustomed. In fact, in the last days she had been thrown into more unaccustomed states of being than she had in her entire existence.

“Take my hand,” her husband ordered, extending the strong appendage towards her.

She eyed it. “Whatever for?”

He let out a long-suffering sigh. “My good woman, must you question every thing?”

“As a general rule. . . Yes.”

“You are going to ride with me,” he said simply.

“I prefer to walk.”

“You could always ride with me,” contributed Charles as he untwisted the top of his silver flask.

“No!” she and her husband vetoed in unison.

“You cannot walk,” Jack said tightly. “We will be traveling a goodly distance and you are hardly wearing trekking boots.

“A practical point,” she conceded, feeling the rocks and clumps of dirt pushing up through the kid leather of her slippers to the pads of her feet. Not that her feet weren’t tough. Unlike London ladies, she could hie back to London without too much carnage to her toes.

“Will such a consideration induce your co-operation?”

She was about to reply with a firm, no, but from the distance, the rapid thudding of horse hooves intruded upon her ability to respond. Horse hooves indicated the possibly imminent presence of the ominous minions of the dowager duchess.

“Well I—”

Before she could even finish her reply, Jack grabbed her and hauled her upon the horse.

For the second time that day, Cordelia found herself being carried in Neanderthal fashion.

With a kick of his boots and a snap of reins, the stallion raced down the road. Cordelia stared at the dark road flying beneath her. Struggling seemed her first line of defense but she enjoyed the shape of her head and had no desire to fall beneath the steal shod hooves. So, with rising fury at his high handedness, she gripped Jack’s calf and forced her body to relax against the charging horse’s powerful body.

She had no idea how long they rode, but they didn’t cease for hours, her own body vibrating with each powerful thud of the horse’s gate.

Jack’s gloved hand, twisted into the back of her frock, kept her relatively stable, and her own familiarity with horses lent her some ease in the wild dash, but her stomach began to protest and the pressure in her head from its angle began to have the most upsetting effects on her equilibrium.

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